The present invention relates to an ICC bar restraining device.
By way of background, when a truck backs up to a loading dock doorway, it is necessary to restrain it against unintentional movement away from the doorway to prevent accidents which may occur both from truck movement and from the creation of a space between the rear end of the truck and the building. To accomplish this, a truck has an ICC bar mounted on its rear portion which projects downwardly below the truck bed. ICC bar restraining devices are usually fastened to the building wall below the doorway to engage the ICC bar and thus restrain the truck from unintentional movement away from the doorway.
There is no standardization of the distance the ICC bars must be above the ground and inwardly from the rear edge of the truck bed. Thus, insoafar as known, prior ICC bar restaining devices were deficient in that they could not latch onto the ICC bars to positively prevent the truck from creeping away from the building wall. In this respect, certain prior ICC bars merely elevated a hook solely in a vertical direction. Such devices therefore had to be spaced sufficiently far from the wall to insure engagement with ICC bars which were at a furthest possible distance from the wall. This oftentimes left a gap between the ICC bar and the latching device so that the truck could move away from the wall before being positively engaged. Other prior devices operated by pivoting a hook or latching member about a fixed axis. These devices were deficient in that they did not extend outwardly a sufficient distance from a building wall to positively engage an ICC bar which was located a relatively great distance from the rear end of a truck or which was too low to be engaged. Furthermore, this type of device would not provide positive engagement with an ICC bar which was located too close to the rear end of the truck and thus a truck could creep away from the wall before it engaged the ICC bar. In short, insofar as known, prior ICC bar restraining devices were not capable of providing positive engagement with ICC bars which were spaced different distances from the ground and different distances from the rear end of a truck.